The unex­pect­ed clo­sure of Bong Joon-ho’s Mem­o­ries of Murder

With one man’s sud­den con­fes­sion, one of the most noto­ri­ous crimes in South Kore­an his­to­ry has been flipped on its head. Last week, 56-year-old Lee Choon-jae admit­ted to being the ser­i­al killer who held the city of Hwaseong gripped with fear from 1986 to 1991. Impris­oned for rap­ing and bru­tal­ly mur­der­ing his sis­ter-in-law in 1994, Lee was recent­ly iden­ti­fied via DNA pro­fil­ing 30 years after the crimes took place, and has now con­fessed to killing five peo­ple in addi­tion to the nine known victims.

The case’s unex­pect­ed clo­sure has led to a surge of renewed media inter­est in the case, rang­ing from dai­ly updates on Lee’s con­fes­sions to doc­u­men­taries hasti­ly thrown togeth­er on the killer’s per­son­al life. Many Kore­ans are also revis­it­ing Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 crime dra­ma Mem­o­ries of Mur­der. Inspired by the Hwaseong ser­i­al mur­der, the film fol­lows detec­tives Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) and Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung) on their unsuc­cess­ful jour­ney to cap­ture the ser­i­al killer ter­ror­is­ing Gyeong­gi province. While the film was well received upon release, the metic­u­lous research that went into the project is often overlooked.

Dur­ing a 10-year anniver­sary pan­el dis­cus­sion on the film, Bong empha­sised the stren­u­ous year­long inves­ti­ga­tion he under­took. ​“I inter­viewed lots of peo­ple relat­ing to the mur­ders,” he recalled, ​“but the per­son I want­ed to talk to the most was the killer him­self.” Bong’s ded­i­ca­tion and gen­uine desire to iden­ti­fy the mur­der­er infused the film’s over­all tone of des­per­a­tion. Mem­o­ries of Mur­der quick­ly became a Kore­an cult clas­sic, help­ing to keep the Hwaseong ser­i­al mur­ders in the pub­lic consciousness.

Fas­ci­nat­ing­ly, the details of the case described in the film are almost iden­ti­cal to those of the real-life mur­ders. The meth­ods used to kill the vic­tims – their limbs bound with their own clothes or under­wear before being suf­fo­cat­ed – are the same as Lee’s. The grotesque scene in which the foren­sic pathol­o­gist pulls peach slices out of a corpse’s muti­lat­ed uterus mir­rors the find­ings of the case. Con­tin­ued inter­est in the film over time led to the for­ma­tion of post-mem­o­ry: the gen­er­a­tional pass­ing of trau­ma. This explains in part why young Kore­ans are so fas­ci­nat­ed by Lee’s arrest, even though the mur­ders took place well before their time. The preva­lence of this cold case in Kore­an pop­u­lar cul­ture was an incen­tive to con­tin­ue inves­ti­gat­ing it.

Addi­tion­al­ly Mem­o­ries of Mur­der has had a wider soci­etal impact in Korea, con­tribut­ing to the devel­op­ment of crim­i­nol­o­gy and foren­sic sci­ence. The rea­son why the case proved so dif­fi­cult to solve was not nec­es­sar­i­ly because the killer had out­smart­ed the police but rather due to poor inves­tiga­tive skills.

In the begin­ning of the film, detec­tive Park rash­ly forges fake foot­prints to cov­er up the fact that a trac­tor had just run over a cru­cial piece of evi­dence. Inter­ro­ga­tion scenes involve Park reg­u­lar­ly drop kick­ing, curs­ing at and down­right tor­tur­ing sus­pects, forc­ing con­fes­sions out of inno­cent par­ties. Through­out the film, Bong con­demns the rough tac­tics of the Kore­an Nation­al Police agency; the release of Mem­o­ries of Mur­der was an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the police to reflect on their short­com­ings and improve their meth­ods of evi­dence collection.

Though many details were true to the orig­i­nal crimes, some were added pure­ly to add a lay­er of dra­mat­ic ten­sion. Thanks to Bong’s film, it is wide­ly accept­ed that the killer only chose to hunt down fair-skinned women dressed in red cloth­ing, and that his sin­is­ter intent became height­ened on stormy nights. Both are mis­con­cep­tions, and con­se­quent­ly the film has been crit­i­cised for sen­sa­tion­al­is­ing the case.

It is impor­tant to note that Mem­o­ries of Mur­der did not direct­ly lead to the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Lee Choon-jae – the deci­sive fac­tor lies with the hard work of the inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cers. Bong, who was at the Beyond Fest in Los Ange­les at the time of Lee’s arrest, inti­mat­ed that we should first and fore­most praise the police for going out of their way to bring the cul­prit to jus­tice. How­ev­er, the film undoubt­ed­ly played an impor­tant role in shap­ing the public’s under­stand­ing of these bru­tal murders.